Final Report on 101 Things in 1001 Days: Volume 1 4

Begin Date: July 4, 2010
End Date: April 1, 2013
Items Completed: 73
Not Completed: 28

My first 101 Things in 1001 Days project ends Monday! While my success rate wasn’t the highest, I’m still really happy with almost 75% completion. Enough that I’ll be starting a new one in a few days… I’m choosing to begin on April 4, so that it will end on New Year’s Eve 2015.

I didn’t finish 28 total items.

Going through and marking them off, it’s interesting to see which of them I no longer care about at the end of almost three years, such as learning the rules of cricket, skippering a sailboat (I still want to go on one, I just don’t want to be in charge), and designing another knitting pattern.

A lot of the unfinished items are travel-related, or dependent on being in a certain place at a certain time of year, so that made it difficult. I wanted to snowshoe, but we had no snow last winter, and then when we were at the cabin with snowshoes available, it was a billion degrees below zero. (I do still want to try it sometime!)

I knew that going to Cuba wasn’t going to happen in that amount of time, but I’m still including it again on my upcoming list. I feel like we’re getting closer and closer to that occurring; we even talked about how to make it happen from Jamaica.  And while I learned that the travel items aren’t always doable, that didn’t stop me from having a bunch of them on the next list, too. It’s what I do.

One that surprised me was “memorize how to make 25 classic cocktails”. I worked on 20 over that time, and I probably actually memorized 15. My memory is shitty, dudes. However, I can tell you the ingredients of pretty much any classic drink… I just can’t always tell you the exact proportions. On my next list, I have a goal to invent some of my own!

I got really, annoyingly close to being totally debt-free, but not quite. (There was one planned chunk of cash that didn’t come in at the end of last year due to unforeseen circumstances, which might have been the final push.) At any rate, I’m on track for that this year and am not going to put it on the next list because it’s definitely happening. It’s time for Phase 2 of the Big Important Financial Lifetime Planning Project* to begin.

I’ll be moving several items from this list to the next one, some unfinished, and some I want to continue to add to.

*The one that results in us moving to an island and owning our own business.

Items I completed as the project ended:

#12 Finish my travel journal within 60 days of getting home from a trip: I posted about our Jamaica trip in the knick of time.

#35 Knit something complex with beads: I didn’t say I had to finish it, did I?? I’ll keep working on it.

#50 Get over my fear of riding my bike in traffic and being run over: that time in Key West helped a ton. I’m not really worried about it anymore, unless I’m in downtown traffic.

#51 Have date night with Matt once a month.

#100 Put $20 towards debt payoff for each completed task on this list, and $50 for each non-completed task: I paid myself $2840 total ($1200 is pending, but I’m not setting a time limit for that. It’s guaranteed). Attaching money to this stuff was totally worth it. 

#101 Have a new list of 101 things in 1001 days ready to go on day 1001: It’ll be up in a few days!

Here’s the full list, for nostalgia’s sake.